The McWetlog

Patti writes to share her frustrations with Apple’s new Magic Mouse:

So, I’ve decided I hate my Magic Mouse. It’s very cool in concept, but in actual use, it falls flat on its face. It goes through batteries like crazy (I think you’d mentioned that). But the worst thing is that it seems to take only the lightest touch to send a page reeling off into no-man’s land. I’m constantly pulling my pages back where I want them and it’s driving me nuts. I can’t seem to train myself not to rest my fingertips lightly on the mouse at times and that’s all it seems to take to get the scrolling going. I think I’m going to switch (regretfully) to a standard two-button mouse with scroll wheel. I’ll lose the cool factor, but at least I won’t spend 20 percent of my time putting pages back where they belong!

Have you any further thoughts on the thing now that you’ve been using it a while longer?

In my last entry about this mouse I mentioned that I found scrolling to be crazy sensitive; I’m hoping they tone it down somewhat in a software update or at the very least allow users to control it. It’s as though Apple’s test case was scrolling through documents or photo libraries, but they didn’t check to see if it was too sensitive for other applications.

Battery life has been shorter than expected: I’m already on my third set of batteries, though I’m using ordinary brand-name alkaline batteries. I suspect I’ll have to use rechargeables. There are reports that the Magic Mouse reports its batteries as dead when there’s still a 40 percent charge, and Magic Mice have been implicated in a recently fixed firmware bug that drained the batteries on Apple wireless keyboards. Magic Mouse power management may not be ready for prime time. Again, I’m hoping for a fix.

It’s still better than Apple’s previous mouse, though. Not that that’s saying much.

Previously: More Magic Mouse observations; First impressions: Apple’s Magic Mouse.

Charlie Stross on why he uses Macs. Never mind what he says about appreciating good industrial design, what rings true for me is his argument that if he’s going to spend 60 hours a week looking at a computer, he’d rather be working with a well-designed system.

I have better things to do with my time than nurse a balky, badly designed system that shits itself all over my hard disk on a regular basis, or spends half its time running urgent maintenance tasks that stop me getting stuff done.

I could write while sitting on a cheap IKEA stool in front of a kitchen table, banging away on a netbook loaded with Windows XP. But after a week, my back and my wrists would hurt and I’d be bleeding from the eyeballs every time I looked at the screen. It’d be like spending sixty hours a week driving a cheap Chevrolet Shitweasel instead of a Mercedes: sure, think of the savings — but the pain will get to you in the end. … If you drive to and from your day job for an hour a day, you’d seriously consider buying a more comfortable car. A better, more comfortable computing environment costs peanuts in comparison.

I spend all day in front of my computer, and I use the heck out of it; it’s worth it to me to spend a lot of money on a good computer (and a decent desk and chair, for that matter). As it happens, I consider Macs to be good computers, and I feel happy and productive using them, so I have no qualms spending extra to buy them.

Concomitantly, I spend less than other people do in other areas: I work from home and don’t get out much, so I don’t buy a lot of clothes and don’t have a monthly cellphone plan. If I had a job that required me to be on the road a lot, my clothes-and-mobile-phone budget would be a lot higher, and we’d probably have more than one car. Similarly, if I used my home computer only occasionally, I might care less whether I had a Mac, and I’d probably have a less powerful machine.

After a month of using Apple’s new Magic Mouse, a couple more observations:

1. The mouse’s touch surface can be crazy sensitive in some applications. Page scrolling seems to be fine, but when scrolling is used for zooming in, for example, games and online maps, a light nudge — even an inadvertent graze of the edge of the mouse — can be enough to zoom in or out halfway, as I found in Civilization IV and Google Maps. It’s actually quite hard to keep things under control.
2. One unforeseen usability problem with the mouse’s symmetrical design: it’s possible to grab the mouse backwards if you’re not looking. Hilarity ensues when you try to use it that way and your mouse movements are flipped 180 degrees, and you wonder what the hell is going on until you see that faint gray Apple logo upside-down …

Previously: First impressions: Apple’s Magic Mouse.

I picked up Apple’s new mouse, the Magic Mouse, yesterday. It was the first time it was in stock at Apple’s Ottawa retail store when I visited it; I’ve been trying to get one for about a month. Apparently, people have been snapping them up as fast as they come in, no doubt desperate to replace Apple’s previous attempt at a mouse, the shittiness formerly called the Mighty Mouse (but since renamed due to trademark issues).

The Magic Mouse addresses two major irritants of the Mouse Formerly Known as Mighty:

1. The Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball would get gunked up within months, rendering it unusable in one or more directions (and cleaning it was a pain); nearly the entire top surface of the Magic Mouse — everything north of the Apple logo — is multi-touch, with momentum scrolling. If you have an iPod touch or an iPhone, you’ll recognize the effect.
2. The Mighty Mouse supposedly had left- and right-button clicking depending on where you clicked the mouse, but this was unusable: if I merely rested a finger on the right side of the mouse, it interpreted it as a right-button click. Needless to say, I had to disable the right mouse button. The Magic Mouse, on the other hand, fixes it — kind of. If you rest a finger on the right side of the mouse and click with your index finger, you’ll get a left-button click. But if you rest a finger on the left side of the mouse and click on the right side, you’ll get a left-button click — in other words, they only fixed half of it. Maybe they decided that fixing the other half created more usability problems than it solved.

I’m still getting used to the shape of the mouse: it feels entirely too flat for my admittedly large hands. And it’s my first wireless mouse; it’s still too early for me to say how well that works.

Holy shit: Apple is opening a retail store in Winnipeg; the Polo Park Apple Store opens this Saturday. Polo Park is the major mall in west-end Winnipeg — i.e., my old neck of the woods — so this is very interesting to me on a personal level.

Does it seem weird to you that Winnipeg got an MEC, two Henry’s and an Apple Store before it got an IKEA?

Just finished upgrading our three Intel Macs to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard; the upgrade, as promised, has generated some real savings in disk space: the two iMacs got nearly an extra 12 gigabytes, my new MacBook Pro an extra eight. (Figuring out the difference is complicated by the fact that Snow Leopard uses a different definition of gigabyte than Leopard does — 1,000 megabytes instead of 1,024 — so I calculated this from the raw byte totals.)

The upgrade hasn’t been without a few glitches: some settings were mysteriously changed, and MobileMe syncs got a little screwy after the first computer was upgraded: for example, it wanted to make changes to my Keychain, which set off my alarms since I’d read this entry, so I disabled MobileMe keychain syncing for the time being. (Don’t mess with my passwords, computers.) But only minor stuff so far.

After Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard, is Apple on the verge of running out of cat names for OS X releases? There are only a few big cats left — Clouded Leopard, Cougar, and Lion — so before too long they’ll have to draw from the lesser cats: Bobcat, Caracal, Colocolo, Jaguarundi, Kodkod, Lynx, Margay, Ocelot, Oncilla, Serval, and a bunch of species named some variant of “cat” (e.g., Jungle Cat, Leopard Cat, Fishing Cat).

One imagines they’ll adopt a new naming convention before they have to resort to OS X 10.19 Rusty-spotted Cat.

Speaking of naming conventions, I’ve adopted one for my own Macs. (I had to call them something for networking purposes.) Big surprise: each of them has been named after a genus of snakes. I started with harmless snakes in the PowerPC era, and went to venomous species for the Intel changeover; I named laptops after smaller snakes:

• iBook G3, 2001: Clonophis (a small North American snake)
• iMac G4, 2003: Elaphe (rat snakes)
• iMac Core Duo, 2006: Crotalus (rattlesnakes)
• iMac Core 2 Duo, 2009: Lachesis (bushmasters)
• MacBook Pro, 13-inch, 2009: Atropoides (jumping pit vipers)

(Now you know which computers to target when you hack into my network.)

Remember how I said that my unstoppable self-restraint prevented me from getting, among other things, a MacBook Pro unless a scenario that justified buying it came to pass?

Well, heh. Funny thing happened. It came to pass. I now have a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Because it’s a secondary computer — I still have this very nice and current 24-inch iMac, after all — it’s the lower-end version (2.26 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD). Now for the justification:

There have been plenty of times when I’ve been away from home but need access not only to my regular files, but to my regular applications — a thumb drive just isn’t enough. While I could whip up a blog entry or essay from just about any machine, anywhere, there are things I can’t easily do from a friend’s or work computer: process images, edit files on my server, organize my notes. Working on two computers will have its challenges, so I’ve reupped with MobileMe (I let my .Mac membership lapse) and am putting all my important files on the iDisk, to sync between both machines (they’ll also be available on my iPod touch, thanks to its iDisk application). I’m also moving my notes back to Yojimbo (previously), which also syncs between machines. I still have to figure out the best way to deal with my 300+ RSS feeds.

There will be other uses. If I install Windows on a partition (e.g., Boot Camp, Parallels or VMWare), I can use this thing for astrophotography. The battery life is certainly impressive from what I can tell so far: the computer will almost certainly last longer in the field than I will. And I’m giving a number of grammar and writing workshops at work: while I could use a whiteboard, or just gesticulate wildly in my usual idiom, or even use a work laptop, there’s something to be said for wowing them with a little Keynote action.

Now that’s enough rationalizing. I must go back and stare at this thing and go squee.

Joey deVilla’s suggestion that, for Windows developers, “the fact that Apple pretty much owns the $1000+ computer market is in fact an opportunity” sounds very much like trying to make lemons from lemonade. DeVilla is, of course, referring to news that Apple’s revenue market share for computers costing more than $1,000 — revenue share is the share of total dollars spent, not the share of units — was 91 percent in June.

That is to say, for every $100 spent on a computer that costs more than $1,000, $91 were spent on a Mac. The average selling price for a Windows PC in June was $515; for a Mac, it was $1,400. There are Windows PCs that cost more than $1,000, but people aren’t buying them. Now more than ever, Windows PC buyers are much more price-conscious than Mac buyers: hardly anyone who is willing to lay out real money for a computer spends it on a Windows PC; they’re either getting enough computer for their needs at a lower price point or they’re buying a Mac.

This is a problem for Windows developers — especially those who hope that people will buy their software. Their potential market has shrunk to a much more price-conscious base. If Windows users aren’t going to spend a lot of money on a computer, will they spend money on software?

Continue reading this entry »

I have to admit that, as a user of Apple’s web browser, Safari, since it came out in January 2003, I’m a little discombobulated by the user interface changes that came with version 4. More than any other update, they’ve changed where everything is: tabs are wider and are closed on the opposite site of the tab; the reload button has been moved from left of the address field to where the SnapBack button used to be; SnapBack appears to have disappeared from the address field (it’s still in the search field); the progress indicator that used to fill the address field has been replaced by “Loading …” at the far right of that field, with no indication of how much of the page has loaded. After six and a half years of using this browser, I have to relearn where everything is.

Early reviews of the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros (or is that MacBooks Pro?) gush about the crazy-stupid battery life afforded by the new machines’ larger, non-removable batteries, which Apple claims last seven hours. “This battery lasts forever,” writes Leander Kahney in his review of the “freakin’ awesome” 13-inch model; he got more than six hours in ordinary use. Anand Lal Shimpi can’t believe that he got more than “eight, freakin’, hours” from the 15-inch MacBook Pro; his multi-page review begins here.

Which is making me rethink my plans to buy a small, Windows-based netbook for autoguiding purposes (see previous entry). While the 10-inch Asus Eee PC 1000HE claims a battery life up to nine and a half hours and costs only $450, the fact is, it would only be used for astrophotography. A low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, on the other hand, may cost $1,400, but it would certainly not be a one-trick pony — the Windows-only astrophotography software could be installed on a Windows partition, and I’d be much happier with a Mac portable when doing virtually anything else. (It’d be nice not having to wait to get home before processing photos taken on trips, for example.)

In other words, I’ve just rationalized spending an additional $950. Oh hell.

(Image courtesy of Apple.)

I’m writing this entry from my new iMac, which I bought at Carbon Computing on Tuesday. I’d gone there intending to poke around; my plans changed dramatically once I realized they had the new iMacs in stock.

In the end, I decided to go with a stock configuration, on the grounds that dithering over the build-to-order options was taking up too much time, and the options I was dithering over were ones I could easily live without. Paying extra for a wireless Mighty Mouse is silly when I realize that I hate the Mighty Mouse; better to get a stock, wired Mighty Mouse and replace it at some point in the future. Whether or not I need the extended keyboard is something I will discover in practice. And paying $180 for a more powerful graphics card is foolish if I don’t need it: I need dedicated graphics for digital photography, not high-framerate games.

Continue reading this entry »

So, along with a number of other products, Apple finally refreshed its iMac line yesterday. I’ll be buying one; I’ve had money set aside for a new Mac desktop for some time, and have been waiting for this refresh to pull the trigger. But I haven’t quite figured out how to spec out my iMac yet; the two main questions are the keyboard and the graphics chipset.

A smaller keyboard that lacks the numeric keypad is now standard — it’s essentially the same keyboard as Apple’s wireless keyboard, except that it’s not wireless (and has USB ports). If I want, I can swap out a full keyboard with numeric keyboard, as a BTO option, and it doesn’t even cost anything. I’m not sure whether I need to. I don’t use the number pad, but I would miss the page up and page down keys. And there is one frequently used application that does use the number pad: Civilization IV. I guess I’ve just answered my own question.

The 24-inch iMac comes with a dizzying selection of graphics chipset options: the integrated Nvidia 9400M on the low-end model, and either the Nvidia GeForce GT 120, the Nvidia GeForce GT 130, or the ATI Radeon HD 4850 on the higher-end models. I’m sure that any of these options is an improvement over the ATI Radeon X1600 on my current machine; the question is, how much more do I need? If I were just writing and blogging, I’d opt for the base model, but photography software — i.e., Aperture and Adobe CS4 Design Premium, in my case — is kind of demanding. I don’t want to over-buy, but I don’t want to end up with the false economy of an underpowered system. Decisions, decisions.

Other observations:

• Unlike the 24-inch LED Cinema Display, the LCD is not LED-backlit; it still uses CCFL backlights, for what I imagine are cost or supply reasons.
• There’s one extra USB port and only one FireWire 800 port. This does not strike me as a problem; most of us have far more USB devices than FireWire devices, and you can always daisy-chain FireWire.
• The drop in the Canadian dollar made these machines more expensive than their predecessors — $200 more expensive, in the case of the price point I was looking at.

You may be surprised to know that a key tool in astrophotography is the lowly USB webcam. In fact, most amateur lunar and planetary photography is done with webcams: the Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager, widely considered the best camera of its class, is from what I’ve read, essentially a Philips ToUCam Pro modified to fit into a 1¼-inch eyepiece barrel. Webcam astrophotography is essentially a low-cost exercise in adaptive optics: the camera shoots 640×480 video, and you use software to select the best frames (shot in rare moments of atmospheric stability), stack them to reduce noise, and apply an unsharp mask to draw out features. The results are surprisingly good, considering. (For more on lunar and planetary imaging with webcams, see these presentation slides (PDF).)

The software is the key link, and of course the fact that I use a Mac complicates things somewhat, because the telescope companies bundle their lunar and planetary webcams with Windows-only software. Doing it on a Mac requires a couple of extra steps.

Stop right now and read Webcam Astrophotography on the Mac, which covers the same ground that I’m about to (and is actually written by someone who knows what he’s talking about).

Continue reading this entry »

Computerworld’s Michael DeAgonia isn’t the first tech pundit to compare the new MacBook Air to the ill-fated Cube — small, stylish and expensive. Though unlike others, who assert that the Air is like the Cube and is therefore doomed, DeAgonia takes pains to say that the comparison isn’t necessarily apt.

Me, I think the Cube comparison is wrong: paying a premium for a laptop that sacrifices performance and cost for size is not the same as paying a premium for a desktop that sacrifices performance and cost for style. A better comparison might be the iPod mini: at the time, people couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t pay $50 more to get three or four times the storage; yet, despite the high cost per megabyte, the mini (and its successor, the nano) became the best-selling iPod model by far. Small matters when you’re dealing with something portable.

Willing to sacrifice cost and performance for size? MacBook Air. Size and cost for performance? MacBook Pro. Size and performance for cost? MacBook. Cluster headaches? Laptop running Vista.

1. Time Capsule: I just bought a hard drive for backup purposes, so there is no immediate need for it. However, this is a really compelling product at a really compelling price, so I may get one once I get a laptop (which would benefit from wireless backup) or other Mac with 802.11n wireless. Otherwise, we’re fine for now.
2. Software updates for the iPhone and the iPod touch: Still no iPhone in Canada. I was just saying the other day that I’d buy an iPod touch immediately if it came with an e-mail and mapping application, and now it does. I still have an underused 30-gigabyte, fifth-generation iPod, so there’s no immediate need for a new one, but the possibilities of it as a PDA/mobile Internet device are intriguing.
3. Software updates and a price cut for the Apple TV: We don’t have a high-definition television, and Apple’s rental service isn’t in Canada yet. Despite interesting Flickr integration, I don’t need this thing.
4. MacBook Air: Reason not the need; WANT. I anticipate buying a laptop this year, and wanted something small and light, enough so that I’ve been considering the Asus Eee and its ilk. But while the MacBook Air is thinner and lighter than a basic MacBook, it’s just as long and wide — the X/Y is essentially the same. It’s clearly meant as a secondary machine; I’m just thinking that it’s easier to contemplate a $1250 secondary machine than a $1900 secondary machine. Still, WANT.

Every time Apple updates one of its products, it also updates its non-U.S. prices to reflect the exchange rate. This means that as the Canadian dollar has risen, their stuff has gotten substantially cheaper in Canada. With the Canadian dollar trading at nearly 95¢ U.S. lately, prices are approaching parity — in fact, in some cases they are at par. This week, after Apple’s product announcements, both iLife and iWork cost $79 ($99 for the family pack) — the same price as in the U.S.

So could someone please explain why .Mac, which costs $99 in the U.S., still costs $139 in Canada? (It’s at least one reason why I let my subscription lapse.)

Apple announced a public beta of version 3.0 of Safari, its Mac-only web browser. Only it’s not a Mac-only browser any more: there is now a Windows version. Rob Griffiths wonders why:

I’m still not certain exactly why Apple felt it necessary to release Safari for Windows, but if this experiment works, it will be good for Mac users; if Safari is used by more people, then there should eventually be fewer sites that won’t work with Safari.

I’m curious myself. Clearly we’re missing a piece of the puzzle. There was a business case for porting iTunes; there is almost certainly one for porting Safari. Compatibility and market share aren’t enough: I bet that Apple would have spent fewer resources if it had just directly improved compatibility. My guess is that Apple has got something up its corporate sleeve that requires a cross-platform Safari. They’re up to something. We just don’t know what that is — yet.

Update, 6/12: In his WWDC post, John Gruber points out some reasons for porting Safari: iPhone development and Mac evangelism are secondary, but the big one, he argues, is the ad revenue from the Google search bar, which already yields something like $2 million a month for Apple. Search engine revenue makes web browsers self-sustaining: it’s how Firefox raises funds. Google feeds an awful lot of people.

640 MB of RAM seemed like plenty on my G3 iBook. 768 MB seemed sufficient on my G4 iMac. But 1 GB never felt like enough on my Intel iMac — maybe the Intel Macs need more memory than their PowerPC antecedents? — so last month I upped it to 2 GB and noticed an immediate improvement: for one thing, Safari no longer crashed as often. Two gigabytes feels like enough RAM — at least for now.

I’m a total fanboy, so of course I thought this short cartoon had six kinds of teh funny:

Via TUAW.

It looks like everyone’s obsessing about the size of Apple’s new iPhone, which was announced today but won’t be available for six months: 43Folders, Engadget, Jason Kottke.

Me, I couldn’t help but notice something else. Apple now has three products — the Mac mini, the Apple TV and the newly released AirPort Extreme — that share the same form factor: basically, a flat square. I wondered — are they the same size? Are they stackable?

Continue reading this entry »

The good news is, my Intel iMac is back from the shop and operational again — and in about half the time I expected it to take.

The bad news is, there’s a new problem: the fans are going full-blast, and the normally silent iMac now sounds like a jet engine. Resetting the PRAM and the SMC has no effect, so it has to go back to the shop. (Sigh.) At least it runs, and I can access my data, even if it is just a little bit deafening.

My working theory is that a heat sensor has been disconnected, and the computer is compensating by running the fans at maximum. We shall see.

An hour on the phone with AppleCare. It costs money, but they do look after you.

The Mac version of Skype with video was released as a beta today (announcement, download), which means that, along with AIM/iChat, I now have a second cross-platform videoconferencing option. I’d like to test it, so if you’re on Skype, drop me a line. If you’re a friend or family and don’t have Skype, this is as good an excuse as any.

See? I’m not the only one who calls the Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball a “scroll nipple” (see previous entry) — have a look at Kirk’s review of the wireless Mighty Mouse.

I’ve had mixed feelings towards the Weblogs, Inc. stable of blogs — not because I’m hostile towards pro blogging (since I are one myself), but because of the quality issues inherent to how they compensate bloggers. When you pay people $4 $x per post, you’re rewarding quantity over quality, and even in my favourite Weblogs, Inc. blogs (like Gadling) it sometimes shows: a lot of mediocre posts, either weak on content or weak on analysis. You don’t get occasional posts of substance, but a flood of more mundane material. The signal/noise ratio is worse than it could be.

Continue reading this entry »

I’ve encountered a glitch with Front Row: it’s not playing nice with iPhoto. I’m not sure what the problem is — probably something is gumming up the works as a result of how I brought the old data over — but I’m assuming it’s solvable. More when I find out how to fix it.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten the Palm syncing with the new iMac — works fine under Rosetta — and I’ve even got Documents to Go working again. My Tungsten T2 came with version 5, while Jennifer’s TX has version 7 — so when I synced up her Palm with my old iMac over Christmas, it overwrote version 7 over version 5 and promptly hosed it on my Palm. Now that we’re on separate machines (she’s using the old iMac), that conflict is no longer a problem. Unfortunately, no sooner had I got that working than I realized that audio was totally hosed on my Palm: I get a faint, high-pitched whine whenever it’s on (not enough to be annoying), but no other sound. (You can tell I don’t use my PDA much any more; it’s been like this for a while but I didn’t really pay much attention to it.)

The car’s headlights are only working intermittently at the moment: they outright failed over the weekend — no daytime running lights, no headlights, no brights — but appear to be working now. Garage suspects the daytime running lights module, maintenance on which requires a Mazda dealership. Sigh — the car is determined to have money spent on it. You can ignore compressors, but you just can’t ignore headlights.

• It’s fast. It’s really flipping fast. I mean, like, ninja fast.
• It’s also surprisingly quiet. I haven’t worked on something this silent since my old G3 iBook. I can feel a fair amount of heat from the top vent so, like those scalding-hot MacBooks, this thing’s cooling system may be geared for silence over really cool temperatures.
• The processor hardly ever breaks into a sweat. I ran a fairly CPU-intensive video conversion program yesterday as a test, and neither core was maxed out, even with other apps running as well.
• We ordered this thing with 1 GB of RAM, which is an improvement over the 768 MB installed in the G4 iMac, but OS X took it all and wanted more. Yesterday I was staring at a 2-GB swap file. It was still reasonably responsive — that new SATA drive is also flipping fast, and hard to hear — but it will still not be difficult to justify getting that second gigabyte of RAM.
• The Migration Assistant only worked partially well. It moved over my applications without a hitch, but choked on my user data. After a couple of attempts, I simply brought it over manually via FireWire Target Disk mode. It seems to work — certainly my apps recognize my data, including user settings and registration codes — but doing it this way might, I suspect, be the reason for a couple of the glitches I’ve encountered.
• My .Mac/iDisk setup got a little wonky at the outset, and I had to unregister and reregister the computer. Nothing got hosed in the process, but I had to sync everything all over again.
• Printing got strange yesterday: the printer’s output was just plain off, with line heights and vertical spacing a real hash. I wonder if the driver is hiccuping with the Intel setup. In any event, using the open-source GIMP-print driver for 900-series HP inkjets solved the issue.
• The scanner works just fine. I’m waiting until I install The Missing Sync before trying to sync up the Palm again.
• While I had to remove two incompatible System Preferences panes manually, all apps tested so far work properly, even using Rosetta. It’s a pleasant surprise that just about all the apps I use are already Universal.
• Let’s talk about the Mighty Mouse. Meh. I can handle the scroll nipple; squeezing the sides is a bit more of a pain. I had to disable right-clicking because my fingers keep resting on the right side of the mouse, triggering a right-click even when I’m trying to left-click.
• The new keyboard, ostensibly the same as the one on the G4 iMac, has a much softer, much less pleasant key action. I may have to break down and buy one of these after all.
• Did I mention that this computer is really flipping fast?

I was occupied last night setting up the new beast: a 20-inch, 2-GHz Intel Core Duo iMac.

Christ, it’s fast. And this big screen is going to take some getting used to. Much brighter — I had the old screen at full brightness; this one only at half. (Such an ordeal.)

I note with interest this report on HardMac (via Gizmodo) that more than 200 Airport Express base stations have ceased functioning 13 to 18 months after purchase — because, you may recall, so did mine.

From the report:

Today, with over 200 reports of APX defects, we can draw some conclusions:
- as we originally suspected, it predominantly affects users living in 220/230V-based countries (98% of the reports).
- all defective APX have been manufactured by Foxconn during S2 2004
- as a result, all defective APX have a serial number starting with HS42, HS43 or HS44.
- most of the defective APX have a product number either A1084 or A1088.

We are still missing proof that the large amount of defective APX is based on a design or component failure, even though we also suspect a Samsung-branded fuse to be part of the problem.

It’s interesting, but not necessarily surprising, that the serial number of my defunct AirPort Express begins with HS44; my replacement base station’s serial number begins with 6F53. And, true to form, the old station lasted a bit more than a year — though I’m not in a 220V region. Interesting.

This page, which I found via Fraser’s comment on this FatBits post by John Siracusa, explains, in technical terms, the difference between the glossy screens on the new MacBooks (see previous entry) and more traditional matte screens:

Both anti-glare and anti-reflective LCD screens serve a distinct purpose. Anti-glare LCD screens may be better suited to office environments, where spreadsheets, word-processing, and similar tasks are the norm — along with many light sources and less flexibility in screen placement. Anti-reflective, on the other hand, may be better suited for graphics, gaming, and multimedia applications — like watching DVDs. While anti-reflective high-gloss LCD screens may seem superior in all facets, they are better suited in indoor environments where ambient light conditions are not as bright. This way the user gets ambient light reflection reduction without sacrificing any image quality. Anti-glare, on the other hand, may be better suited to the outdoors or indoor environments with brighter or direct light. In this situation, the user may be better off sacrifice [sic] image quality for maximum ambient light reflection reduction.

This might suggest that a MacBook would be just fine at home, but perhaps less so in libraries with lots of fluorescent lighting — though not every library is as strongly lit as a cubicle warren. Probably equivalent to a CRT, both in terms of colour depth and reflectivity.

Random thoughts on the new MacBooks, the iBook replacements Apple announced this morning:

• I wonder what the impact of these new “glossy” screens is; they’re probably better than matte screens in some cases, but worse in others.
• The base model is $100 more expensive in the U.S. than the previous base-model iBook but, thanks to the rising Canadian dollar, is actually $100 cheaper here.
• Everyone notices that the black model is more expensive than a comparably equipped white model — by US$150/C$140. Given the popularity of the black iPods, it’s understandable that Apple has decided to market black as a premium (more exclusive) option.
• Like the Mac Mini (previous entry), the MacBooks come with Intel Integrated Graphics rather than a dedicated video chipset and RAM. I wouldn’t run Aperture on these things, nor would I use them as primary machines. As part of a laptop/desktop combination, they’re fine.
• Because of the memory requirements of the integrated graphics chipset, the RAM must be paired for better bandwidth; they come standard with 2×256 MB.
• The graphics notwithstanding, the MacBooks have lots of features that the iBooks never did: gigabit Ethernet, monitor spanning, closed-lid operation, digital audio in/out — the iBooks never even had a microphone port.
• Apple isn’t arbitrarily crippling features on its low-end machines any more. Nor are the processors significantly slower. The video chipset is now the main differentiator between these computers and the MacBook Pro models (which also add an ExpressCard slot and a backlit keyboard).

Later:

• Neat keyboards: they’re recessed so that the keys are flush with the rest of the computer. Will have to see one close-up in the polycarbonate.
• The hard drive is apparently user-replaceable.
• You can’t upgrade the low-end, 1.83-GHz model to include a DVD burner.

It turns out that the long delays I sometimes experience when trying to open or save a document — the application hangs for several seconds — is due to issues with iDisk syncing: “The problem lies in the fact that the local iDisk (stored in /Volumes/iDisk) has symbolic links (aliases) to folders on the remote iDisk (/Volumes/your_mac.com_name). When OS X lists the local iDisk’s contents, info for these folders must be loaded from the remote iDisk, which can take some time.” For some reason I assumed it had something to do with the external hard drive I bought last fall.

This is the most pressing question from the new Mac ads: In “WSJ”, is the PC (played by resident expert John Hodgman) referring to a review in the Awesome Awesome Computer Review Weekly Journal, or is he referring, with a bit of a stammer, to the Awesome Computer Review Weekly Journal? I’m sure that confusion happens a lot on the newsstands. You’d think the two publishers would have a sit-down over it or something.

John Gruber is going full-time: he’s making Daring Fireball, arguably the best bit of Mac writing on the web, his full-time job as of this week. (Two years ago, he started trying to earn a living wage from the site; now he’s taking the plunge. I’ve been a member since the start.)

You will recall that I’m quite interested in whether people can turn blogging and personal sites into a full-time career — Heather Armstrong’s done it, through advertising; Jason Kottke, who solicited donations (“micropatrons”), had mixed results — because, completely by accident, I’m trying to do the same thing. Almost all of my (puny) income comes from my web sites (mostly The Map Room), though I’m working on other avenues as well. (My so-called “little of this, little of that” business plan.) As I’ve said before: if they can succeed, spectacularly, there’s a chance that I might be able to muddle through.

Here’s hoping that John succeeds spectacularly.

Today, Apple announced a new Mac Mini line with Intel processors and a new iPod speaker system, the iPod Hi-Fi.

Initial thoughts on the new Mac Mini:

• It’s more expensive than its G4-based predecessor: US$599/C$699 for the 1.5-GHz Core Solo model; US$799/C$949 for the 1.67-GHZ Core Duo model.
• But it’s arguably better equipped: each model comes with wireless standard, more USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and digital audio in/out. It gains a microphone port and loses its modem.
• In a first for a Mac, the Mini uses Intel Integrated Graphics and shared memory instead of an ATI or Nvidia graphics chipset with dedicated memory. What are the implications for Quartz Extreme and Core Graphics? (Update: It might still be better than the Radeon 9200 in the G4 Mini. Update #2: Apparently it’s a GPU for video playback rather than 3D gaming.)
• The Mini ships without a keyboard and mouse, as usual, but comes with a remote. (It’s got Front Row, but, as you might expect, no iSight.) There’s something strange about that.

As for the Hi-Fi, it’s definitely aimed at the high end of the iPod speaker market, at US$349/C$429. You have to plug in an iPod (or another audio source), but it’s being positioned on Apple’s web pages as another iPod, which may cause some confusion:

Me, I’d been hoping for a component unit with a hard drive that synced like an iPod wirelessly, but I imagine that the AirPort Express already fills that niche. So does a cable from an iPod to the back of your amplifier, for that matter.

But it doesn’t look like Apple means to complement your existing home stereo; it means to replace it.

Yojimbo came out last month. It’s a scrapbooking program for storing random bits of information — notes, passwords and serial numbers (encryptable), bookmarks or even fully archived web pages — that can be searched, organized into themed collections and so on. I’ve been using it for my writing notes — future blog posts, stories and so forth — and I like it well enough that, with the 30-day demo running out, I bought a licence for it.

Continue reading this entry »

MacSlash is reporting that Apple is hiring for a future retail store at the Carrefour Laval in Laval, Quebec, just north of Montreal. The Toronto store opened last year but, at five hours away, it’s hardly convenient; this would cut the one-way travel time to the nearest Apple Store to about three hours.

A follow-up to yesterday’s post. Though multiple hard resets were able to resuscitate it for short periods of time today, I’ve decided to declare my AirPort Express clinically dead. Off to buy a new one, probably tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve got a whack of Ethernet cable connected to a laptop that’s sharing its connection via WiFi. (The old AirPort was definitely the culprit in the case of the poor iChat bandwidth; it was considerably improved under the new setup, which is admittedly a hack — iChat was crashing on my iMac for some reason, so I had to haul the iSight downstairs.)

The performance of my AirPort Express base station has been degrading in recent months and has gotten even worse recently. Videoconferencing with my mother — who’s just bought a new iMac with the built-in camera — is next to impossible due to low bandwidth, but we’re both on broadband. I suspect my wireless network as the culprit there. I also have to reboot my base station as often as several times a day to regain performance approximating normalcy. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s terrible: bad enough at times that I think it’s time to buy a replacement; good enough often enough that I hope I can defer that purchase. The way things have been going lately, though, it looks like I’ll be going shopping very soon.

It’s hard to troubleshoot something as ephemeral as wireless networking: hard to tell whether it’s an ISP problem, a local interference problem (neighbours running a microwave, say), or a hardware problem, though it’s increasingly looking like the last. The base station may have been acting up as early as last June, when we first moved here, though it’s possible that the sudden bouts of weak signal were due to interference rather than hardware problems. The other thing is, I expect hardware to be binary: either it works or it’s broken; having it “kinda-sorta” work is kinda-sorta counterintuitive.

But electronics have a hard time of it out here, thanks, I suspect, to the wonkiness of the power supply — lots of brief outages and, presumably, surges. So far we’ve had to replace our cable modem once — that unit, too, had exhibited some inconsistently weird performance — and have burned through an Airport (Snow) base station and an aquarium pump as well. I’ve got my iMac on a UPS, and, while I’ve got all the living room electronics (TV etc., stereo, cable modem and base station) on a surge protector, I think I’ll get a UPS for that stuff as well, just to be sure. Electronic gadgetry just isn’t safe in these parts, and frankly I’d rather not have to make a new wireless router an annual purchase.

See previous entries: Rewireless; Security alert: Mac networks susceptible to irony.

For years I’ve been using Mail.app’s rules to sort my incoming e-mail: mail from my web site contact forms go in these folders, mail from friends and family go in these folders, comment and trackback notifications go here, mailing list messages go there. While this keeps my inbox from getting totally unmanageable, I’ve had a tendency to lose track of messages and, as a result, forget to reply to them.

I think I’ve solved this by adding a new smart folder in Tiger’s Mail.app. The folder holds unread and flagged messages. If a new message requires action on my part — a reply, a blog post, or something else — I flag it. If not, I don’t — the message will disappear from the folder the next time it updates.

If I keep at this, I should end up in a state if I don’t reply to you, it’s because I don’t want to, not because the message got lost in the shuffle.

Apple’s .Mac suite of Internet services was upgraded this morning, just before the early adopters’ annual subscriptions come up for renewal. In a nutshell, the enhancements are: a bump in disk space, from 250 MB to 1 GB; Backup 3.0, with incremental backups and backup plans; and a new Groups feature.

I’m already making use of Backup 3.0: I bought a 160-gigabyte external FireWire drive for backup and extra storage last week; I figured that data loss was not something I could cope with. Version 3 is definitely an improvement, especially with the automated plans. It’ll be a lot easier to back up my data like a good boy.

As for Groups — well, it’s something I’d like to use, but it’s much more limited than other social-networking services. Private, invitation-only, and needs a trial Mac.com account. There’s probably a use for this, but its niche is not yet obvious to me. Must ponder.

Ever since I got my 17-inch G4 iMac in December 2003, I’ve periodically run into a problem where the computer would lock up when entering sleep mode: the screen would be dark, but the computer would not respond to any user input. It happened relatively infrequently, and relatively irregularly: a couple of times a week, then nothing for months. One suggestion was faulty RAM, but I didn’t think that fit the description. At least it was infrequent enough that it didn’t interfere overmuch with my work; I rarely, if ever, lost any data.

It happened again this morning. For some reason it occurred to me to yank out the Bluetooth adapter from the USB hub. It worked immediately: the computer sprung back to life.

Now why didn’t I think of that before? That Bluetooth adapter — it’s an older D-Link dongle that isn’t compatible with Apple’s wireless mouse and keyboard — had been giving me trouble with my G3 iBook. Just not the same kind of trouble, I suppose, or I’d have recognized it sooner.

Reports of problems with iTunes 5, which was released last week, are beginning to circulate. Here’s another data point for the blogosphere. When I installed it I received an error message when it tried to import my iTunes 4 library, but my music all showed up. It hosed my podcast subscriptions, though; they disappeared from “Podcasts,” but remained as separate playlists. Reconstructing my podcast subscriptions was trivial — I only have a few — but now they stay in my regular library, and don’t get removed when I’m done with them unless I remove them manually. No other problems with iTunes 5, though.

Boolean searches are possible in Spotlight: Hiram figured out OR and NOT a few days ago. More fiddling to ensue. Via Mac OS X Hints.

I’m missing Boolean operators right now. Neither Flickr’s new badges (by tag, by group) nor Tiger’s new Smart Folders allow them, at least on the surface, and they’d have been handy these past two days.

Bloggers and media organizations are filing amicus briefs in the Apple suit against rumour sites (my take on which is here). Paul McCleary writes, in his excellent summary of the case on CJR Daily, “One can’t help but notice that in a certain sense, Judge Kleinberg and the media types seem to be talking past each other.”

In his March 11 ruling, which is being appealed (hence the amicus briefs), Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled that Apple could go after the rumour sites for their sources. Kleinberg ruled that the question of whether the rumour sites constituted journalism was irrelevant. From his decision:

But even if the movants are journalists, this is not the equivalent of a free pass. The journalist’s privilege is not absolute. For example, journalists cannot refuse to disclose information when it relates to a crime. […] Whether [O’Grady] fits the definition of a journalist, reporter, blogger, or anything else need not be decided at this juncture for this reason: there is no license conferred on anyone to violate valid criminal laws.

In other words, your obligation to obey the law is not affected by your status as a journalist, so whether or not you’re a journalist is irrelevant.

Continue reading this entry »

Tiger — Mac OS X 10.4 — is coming out April 29. Apple’s page covers not just the new features, but summarizes all the OS’s features, including those first introduced in Jaguar and Panther, which is useful: you get a big picture of the whole OS; it’s not like the things announced in 2002 aren’t there any more.

The collapsing U.S. dollar makes stuff cheaper. In 2002, Jaguar cost C$219. In 2003, Panther’s retail price was C$179. Tiger, on the other hand, is priced at C$149 — education price, C$89. (The U.S. price has been US$129 at each iteration.) At least Apple prices are cheaper just before the inevitable global financial collapse.

Am I looking forward to it? Hell yes. I’ve got ideas for Spotlight and Automator, and I’ve wanted Dashboard for months. Also looking forward to having third-party programs sync between computers — especially NetNewswire.

A correspondent identifying himself as a former B.Mac employee writes, “Have a look at this. After the company goes belly up and hundreds of people including employees and clients are hurt in its closing, they have reopened.” It looks like B.Mac, after closing all four stores and declaring bankruptcy last fall, will be opening a store on the Plateau in Montreal. Down, but not out.

Their closure did little to endear themselves to the local Mac cognoscenti, some of whom were, if I remember correctly, quite pissed, especially those who didn’t know where else to go for servicing (or those who had gear in for repair when the doors were shuttered). And with Apple opening retail stores in Canada this year (though no stores confirmed for Montreal yet), this can’t be the best climate for them. Still, despite these challenges, I wish them well.

See previous entries: B.Mac closes Ottawa store; B.Mac closure update.

Much of the online commentary regarding Apple’s lawsuits against several rumour sites frames it in terms of whether the rumour sites are bona fide journalists. In doing so, they conflate Apple rumour-mongers with bloggers and run up the flag on the so-far endless debate on whether bloggers are journalists. That’s an issue near and dear to the hearts of many bloggers craving legitimacy, but in this particular case it’s a red herring: whether or not Think Secret et al. are legitimate journalists has nothing to do with whether they were right to publish Apple’s upcoming products or are protected from the consequences of doing so.

Jeff Harrell thinks so too:

Was [Think Secret’s Nick] Ciarelli pursuing a news story? If the answer is yes, then he deserves to be given an exception from the laws governing trade secrets. For example, if he reported that Apple was dumping toxic chemicals into the groundwater behind their corporate headquarters, that would clearly be an important story, one which the public would have an obvious right to know. It would also clearly be a trade secret. In that case, the public’s right to know trumps company’s right to protect its trade secrets.

But we’re not talking about illegal dumping here. We’re not talking about blowing the whistle. We’re talking about the disclosure of specifications and prices for upcoming products, details that were obtained by convincing Apple employees to break their confidentiality agreements.

Newsworthy? Hardly. Important? No. Was Ciarelli on the trail of The Truth, a latter-day Bob Woodward blowing the roof off of a massive scandal? No, he was not. He was soliciting trade secrets and publishing them. So I don’t see any reason at all why he should be exempted from the normal laws governing such activity.

The test, therefore, is not whether whoever’s doing the publishing is a journalist, but whether the public interest is being served by it. And that’s something that can only be determined by the legal system. News organizations that publish private details about celebrities — or even ordinary people — do get sued, and successfully: the test is not simply whether it’s a secret that people are interested in. Corporations aren’t people, you may reply — but corporations do have trade secrets. Hence NDAs and the law under which Think Secret is being sued. What if Google Watch received, and published, Google’s entire PageRank algorithm? I’ll bet we’d all find that very interesting — unless we owned once-valuable Google stock.

And reporters who do publish stories that blow the whistle and serve the public interest, but who fail to reveal their sources, can get into trouble anyway (though in that case it was a public inquiry, not the leakee looking for blood). Journalists are sometimes threatened with jail for not identifying sources (in the context of criminal trials resulting from their reporting). Why should rumour sites get a free pass just because they’re making ad revenue off of our eagerness to find out what Steve is pulling out of his sleeve next?

It’s hard to see how learning about upcoming or unreleased Apple products a little earlier than the formal announcement serves the public interest. If you think it does, you probably need more hobbies.

This morning Apple announced revisions to its iPod mini and iPod photo product lines. They’re cheaper and they come with more storage: the iPod mini now comes in two capacities, 4 GB (US$199, formerly US$249) and 6 GB (US$249); the 60-GB iPod photo drops US$150 to US$449, and the 40-GB iPod photo is replaced by a cheaper, 30-GB model that’s thinner because it uses a single-platter drive, at US$349.

The iPod decontenting continues: no iPod model now ships with a dock, and the iPod photos do not come with AV cables. In fact, the new models don’t even ship with a FireWire cable, just a USB 2.0 cable. This has raised a certain amount of ire and the inevitable petition. As usual, I don’t think much of the histrionics involved when Apple does something its fanboys don’t like. They generally invoke every argument — loyalty to the Mac fanbase or nefariously abandoning the FireWire standard — except the sensible ones. In this case it comes down to economics.

Continue reading this entry »

Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by how much my various tech toys actually improve my life — or in this case, my workflow. For tomorrow’s “Tech Weekly” feature (see previous entry), the Citizen wanted to use a couple of my photos, and agreed to pay me for them. Some paperwork was naturally involved.

First, I had to sign the freelancer’s agreement. Time was, I would have printed the Word file, signed it, scanned it, and either faxed it or e-mailed it as an image inserted into a Word file or as a PDF. But now I’ve got a tablet. I was able to doodle out my signature and insert it directly into the file, save it as a PDF, and e-mail it back. No printing, no scanning, no faxing, no fuss.

Then they wanted an invoice. Being new and naïve in the ways of the freelancer, I didn’t know what format an invoice took. What to do? I started searching the web. But look! Pages comes with an invoice template, from which I was able to build my own. Signed, saved to PDF, and sent.

That was painless. That’s how it’s supposed to work, folks.

Now that I have an iSight, video conferencing with me is now possible. Tried it with David on Saturday morning and it worked very well. Other friends and family members who might be interested in trying this as well, take note of this post.

Even if you don’t have a camera, one-way conferencing is still an option; you just need an appropriate instant messenger account.

Mac users running Panther will want to use iChat: use your AIM screen name, if you have one, or a .Mac account. You can get a free .Mac ID by signing up for the free 60-day trial; you can keep the ID after the trial expires.

If you’re on Windows, you’ll need AIM 5.5 or higher to do videoconferencing.

My camera is also compatible with Yahoo, but it’s video only — no sound. MSN Messenger for Mac does not support video conferencing.

You can find out how to contact me if you’re resourceful enough, or know how to ask nicely.

I’ve also been using it as a barcode scanner with Delicious Library. It works reasonably well, though the mass-market paperbacks’ barcodes are generating errors. Probably a problem with the Amazon database that the software uses for book data.

A few articles on other uses for and tips for using the iSight:

• Making Movies with the Apple iSight (Derrick Story, July 1, 2003)
• You Sexy Thing! How to Look Great on iChat AV, in Spite of Your Spiteful iSight (Nitrozac and Snaggy, March 16, 2004)
• How to Fall in Love with Your iSight, Again (Nitrozac and Snaggy, July 20, 2004)

When it comes to text editors for HTML coding, I’m torn between SubEthaEdit and TextWrangler. TextWrangler used to cost money but as of last week is free; I’ve been trying it out as a result. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, most of which I don’t notice. SubEthaEdit has live HTML previewing, which is really useful when coding on the fly; TextWrangler doesn’t. TextWrangler, on the other hand, allows you to open and save files via FTP, which saves several steps and considerable time and allows me to make quick updates to web pages without logging in and using pico. In practice, this feature may be more important than live previewing: much of my substantial web work over the past week can be directly attributed to the ease of updating that save-to-FTP allows.

For the first time since April, when my AirPort base station blew out, we’ve got a wireless network in the home again. Jennifer, using her education discount, splurged and got an AirPort Express and an AirPort Extreme card for the iMac. The rationale behind this is to reduce desk clutter (moving the printer and modem off, connecting them to the base station elsewhere) and to allow wireless-equipped laptops to connect (Jen’s old Toshiba or a school iBook or an eventual new iBook or Powerbook, or a visitor’s).

We got it set up last night, with no difficulties except that our ISP had to reset the modem — apparently it locks to a specific device and won’t work with anything else, which means you can’t just unplug it from one computer and plug it into another (I’m sure there’s a reason for it). It’s working well; I’ve got some oboe concertos coming out the stereo — which for some reason is less distracting than the computer speakers, even if they’re only a couple of metres apart.

Related: My WiFi links.

News flash: Macs are less expensive than PCs.

Don’t believe me? It’s true — when you compare them to similarly equipped PCs. I mean, sure, when you use a stripped-down, bare-bones system with shared memory instead of an AGP graphics card as your reference point, Macs do seem pricey — particularly when, as some slashtards are wont to do, they compare low-end PCs to top-end Power Macs solely on the basis of processor speed.

But, as Paul Murphy wrote on LinuxInsider last month, when you compare Macs to brand-name PCs with the same specs (RAM, hard drives, optical drives, screen size, I/O, software), Macs actually come out ahead — and this was done before the new G5 iMac played hell with the price/value equation. Speaking of which, according to osViews’s Harry Rider, a G5 iMac is actually $300 cheaper than building your own PC from parts! (Assuming, naturally, that you don’t pirate the PC software.)

Apple used to charge as much as $7,000 for Macintoshes. That was over a decade ago. (Received wisdom dies hard.) They’ve been getting cheaper all the time, to the point where a 15-inch PowerBook now is cheaper than a 12-inch iBook three years ago, and a 15-inch TiBook in 2001 went for more than a 17-inch PowerBook does now.

An update to my previous entry about B.Mac’s closure of its Ottawa store: MacNN is reporting that, according to a Montreal Gazette article (update: behind the subscriber wall), B.Mac has closed three of its four stores overall and may lose the fourth. The Gazette article apparently blames a declining user base; what limited information I have seen blames managerial cock-ups. It usually is, whenever a store closes, though management always blames something else — market conditions, the competitors, the suppliers.

Worldwide sales have been no worse in the last few months than they’ve been in the previous few years — in fact, they’ve been a little bit better for Macs, and obscenely good for iPods. And when you factor in the rise of the Canadian dollar over the past year and a half, which has meant an effective price cut of a few hundred dollars on a new Mac, the opportunity for sales should be even better. If B.Mac hasn’t been able to keep its head above water recently, it’s not because of market conditions, because they’ve never been as favourable in years, from what I can tell.

One factor: location. According to one commenter on the MacNN story, B.Mac’s Montreal stores are poorly located: one in an industrial area, another downtown but not at street level. Ottawa’s was in a suburban strip mall: downtown residents had to take the bus for an hour to get to it. (Hint: Don’t advertise in trendy downtown alternative papers and situate yourself in Nepean.) Apple’s retail strategy, on the other hand, obsesses about location: their stores show up in new, upscale or trendy shopping areas, and they’re always high-traffic areas. It’s true what they say: location’s everything.

B.Mac seems to have closed its Ottawa store. As I noted in the thread, they’ve been reducing their hours throughout the summer. I don’t think they’d been getting new stock in, either. But at no point did anyone suggest anything was up until the doors were closed; me, I’d thought they were being suicidally dumb to reduce their hours to the point where no one who was gainfully employed could visit the store. In hindsight, the decision had already been made.

This is a real pity, because it was hands-down the best Mac reseller in the Ottawa area. (I suppose I could wish really hard for an Apple Store.)

Say hello to Florence and her new 15-inch PowerBook (which is, I must jealously admit, an amazing computer).

(Apologies for the Dell mousepad polluting the photo; optical meeces don’t work well on glass tabletops.)

The Art of the Parlay: John Gruber shows once again why he’s worth every penny of the “Daring Fireball” membership fee. (Having said that, where’s my blasted T-shirt, hey?)

In this long article, he argues that the Macintosh’s marginal market share was not because Apple refused to licence the OS to other computer manufacturers, but rather because Apple didn’t provide an upgrade path for its enormous Apple II user base — in other words, Apple didn’t leverage its existing marketshare but instead essentially started from scratch. To move to the Mac, Apple II users had to leave all their hardware, peripherals and software behind — whereas MS-DOS users were able to migrate to Windows “slowly and incrementally.” Had Apple done otherwise, Gruber argues, the Mac might have been more successful in a marketshare sense, but less revolutionary. (Imagine if there had been a successor to the Apple IIgs.)

Now, Gruber’s article struck a chord with me because it echoes my family’s experience. In the mid-1980s we each had an Apple II+ or a IIe. By the late 1980s we each had an Apple IIgs. By the early 1990s we each had a 386- or 486-class PC. What happened? Without a post-IIgs upgrade path, switching to a PC was no more onerous than switching to a Mac, and it was less expensive. I imagine that a lot of Apple’s customers were lost this way. In the end, my father and his brothers were pissed at Apple for killing the Apple II line, and when you talk to them about it today, they’re still mad at them for it. There is a reason why I’m the only Mac user in my family!

The Apple Product Cycle is a brilliant parody, not so much of Apple’s product development (though it does skewer its launch and ship dates), but of the ridiculous reactions of Mac fanboys — and the tech media — to expected or rumoured product releases. It’s funny because it’s true. Via Cult of Mac.

The Missing Sync 4, available next month, is a full replacement for the increasingly creaky HotSync Manager for Mac OS X. Previous iterations of the Missing Sync have enabled Mac compatibility with a whole whack of handhelds, Palm OS or otherwise. This version integrates all the previous hacks for Palm OS handhelds (Sony Clié, Tapwave Zodiac, Garmin iQue) and adds features not available in HotSync. Me, I’m looking at the iPhoto plugins and the Internet sharing via Bluetooth.

This software is what will enable Palm Cobalt compatibility with the Mac; PalmSource had earlier indicated that they would not ship a Mac version of HotSync for Cobalt, but that third-party solutions would be available (see previous entry). Here’s that third-party solution, even though no Cobalt devices have shipped yet.

In the meantime, this’ll be compatible with Palm OS 4 and OS 5 devices. This means that Jen’s m500 and my Tungsten T2 will work with this, though OS 3.x devices won’t — too bad for imminent switchers Florence (Palm m105) and David (Palm Vx), who will have to use HotSync (which is at least free).

John Gruber’s “Daring Fireball” essays invariably get widely circulated around the Mac web, and for good reason; his latest is no exception. In it, he argues that the reason why there isn’t any spyware, malware, and other assorted crapware on the Mac is because Mac users have absolutely no tolerance for it.

Especially interesting — startling, actually, because it’s so clever — is the analogy he makes to urban decay:

My answer to question posed earlier — why are Windows users besieged with security exploits, while Mac users suffer none? — is that Windows is like a bad neighborhood, strewn with litter, mysterious odors, panhandlers, and untold dozens of petty annoyances. Many Windows users are simply resigned to the fact that their computers contain software that is not under their control. And if they’ll tolerate an annoying application that badgers them with pop-up ads, well, why not a spyware virus that logs every key you type, then sends them back to the creator? …

The Mac is like a good neighborhood, where the streets are clean and the crime rate low. You don’t need bars on your windows in a good neighborhood; you don’t need anti-virus software on the Mac.

Which doesn’t do his argument justice, because doing it justice would require a hella long quote. Worth reading in full.

A cursory check of Applelegal.com would indicate that it’s not run by Apple Computer, and it’s certainly not their legal department. There’s the About page, for example, which says: “Welcome to Apple Legal, a Macintosh software review site.” (Emphasis mine.) Can’t imagine why they’d pick such a confusing URL, though, unless it’s deliberately to catch people who’d type such things in, hoping to find Apple Legal — but that’s so pre-Google.

In any event, somebody got taken in, and wrote a lengthy screed denouncing Apple for a snotty browser-detection message. Considering that her entire premise is wrong, her over-the-top outrage makes her look (and feel, I bet) pretty foolish. [Edit: Since corrected, to her credit.] But mistakes happen, especially if you’re not familiar with the material. And it’s an easy thing in the blogging world to fulminate before checking the details (cf. Slashdot, RTFA, etc.) — boy, don’t I know that!

But a Mac news site (that solicits donations) should really know better. [Update: Rob’s removed the entry without running a correction.]

As advertised, iTunes 4.5 plays nice with fast user switching. It used to get confused when one user launched iTunes while another user’s iPod was still attached. That’s been resolved. And, if both users have iTunes running, you can share your music libraries as though you were on two separate computers on the same network. (Not that I tried this before, so for all I know this was the case in earlier versions.)

A whole pile of software updates kept me busy this morning:

• Palm Desktop 4.2.1 (apparently addresses Panther incompatibilities like fast user switching — good thing I installed this before moving Jen’s m500 to the iMac — and the Send to Handheld droplet); and
• QuickTime 6.5.1 (new lossless codec), iMovie 4.0.1 (bugfixes), iTunes 4.5 (new features), and an iPod updater (compatibility with abovementioned new codec and features).

Whew! (And so far nothing has exploded yet.)

Yesterday we set up my broken-screened iBook with a surplus 15-inch monitor from Jen’s school. It still needed a new keyboard and mouse to be complete, but once it was set up we had a (somewhat awkward) second Mac workstation. I was looking forward to having a bit of networking set up between the two computers, having two Macs available in the household at any one time …

… and then irony struck. My Airport Base Station blew this afternoon. Not sure if it’s fixable — I’ve still got to do a bit of research — but here’s what happened. It couldn’t maintain a connection with the cable modem for more than a few seconds after rebooting. It could generate a wireless LAN fine enough; it just couldn’t stay connected to the Internet.

(No, I didn’t install the dodgy Airport 3.4 update. It’s a snow base station, not Extreme. At least I don’t think I installed the update … I installed an awful lot of updates on the iBook last night … )

So much for that little experiment. I’ll see if it’s fixable, but it’s not worth the cost or effort to replace the base station at this moment. (It’s provided non-stop service for over two years; I don’t think that’s too bad.)

A man, an unlimited data plan, and a whole whack of devices and software: Matt’s a convert to Bluetooth, using his PowerBook and his T68i to connect anywhere there’s a GPRS signal, among other things. His mind boggles at the idea of ubiquitous net access. It’s something I’ve been coveting for a while, and something I’ll make a priority when I safely re-ensconce myself somewhere urban.

The eMac, often the forgotten sibling in Apple’s product lineup, is the first Apple product to receive an upgrade in three months. Price: $1,049 or $1,299 (Cdn), depending on the optical and hard drive options. Though it now has the same processor speed as my 17-inch iMac (1.25 GHz, up from 1 GHz), it’s actually more powerful in two aspects: the processor has a 512-KB L2 cache, which means it’s a 7457-class G4, previously only found in PowerBooks (the iMac has a 7455 with 256 KB of L2); and the DVD burner in the $1,299 model is an 8× drive, whereas those found currently in iMacs and Power Macs are only 4× (the PowerBooks’ DVD burners are 2×). That at least suggests where some things may be going with other models.

Drool. The only bright side in having to use a Power Mac 7200 as my workstation last fall was that it had an excellent keyboard — a good thing in journalism, don’t you think? I heard about this thing last year and can understand full well why (1) everyone wants one and (2) it’s heavily backordered until the end of this month. (Damn!) Here’s Engst’s review of the Tactile Pro Keyboard. (via Slashdot)

Update 4/8: Boing Boing and Gizmodo have picked up the story. It just got a lot harder to get one, I think.

When it comes to the supply channel, I’ve noticed that Apple usually tries to err on the side of caution: better to have too little in the channel than too many. Shortages are better than unsold stock piling up in warehouses. (Remember the sudden drop-off in flat-panel iMac demand, for example.) But the iPod mini, on the other hand, is in short supply because there just aren’t enough of those little four-gigabyte hard drives available; as a result, the international release has been pushed back from April to July.

So, another parts shortage. So what does it mean? It’s at least in part due to demand forecasts that turned out to be too conservative; they would have ramped things up differently — tried to order more hard drives from Hitachi, delayed release, or delayed international release. But then if they weren’t expecting limited supply and strong demand, they wouldn’t have opted for a two-tier rollout. In any event, it’s quite different from the conventional wisdom, which was that it was going to bomb.

Wired has an interview with “Professor iPod” Michael Bull, talking about the social impact of that gadget. Actually it’s a bit of a misnomer, since he’s an expert on the social impact of personal stereos, from Walkmans on (profile).

If I had finished my Ph.D. — social history of music — I would have been all over this guy. Since I was interested in the divide between public and private music (performances vs. listening at home) and active and passive music (playing vs. listening), as well as the usual gender and class stuff, his work would have fit right in.

Now that I think of it, doesn’t GarageBand do something in terms of invigorating the active aspect of music, opening up opportunities for playing and, through sharing the music, performing that otherwise would have had obstacles insurmountable for some — whether through lack of lessons or lack of technology (not being able to afford Pro Tools or the bank of sound equipment plugged into the back of a Power Mac).

PalmSource’s decision to drop Mac compatibility from Cobalt (formerly known as Palm OS 6) is, on the surface, maddening. But this cloud may have a cobalt-thorium G silver lining.

Cobalt will have a different PIM architecture that renders it incompatible with the current Palm Desktop. The current Palm Desktop for Mac, however, sucks — and sucks hard, and the HotSync Manager is only barely on speaking terms with iSync. Mark/Space has already announced that it will release a version of Missing Sync for Palm Cobalt devices — they’ve made or announced similar software to get Sony Cliés, Pocket PCs and Danger Hiptops to sync up with a Mac. They might, in other words, come up with a solution better than anything PalmSource could come up with.

It also raises the question: assuming that the PIM architecture is readily accessible to third parties (as HotSyncing is not), why might not Apple itself engineer Cobalt compatibility directly into iSync? At least one commenter in the Palm Infocenter story’s comments raised that possibility, drawing an analogy with Microsoft ending IE development as Apple released Safari.

The problem this time is that the alternatives aren’t in place in time to reassure nervous consumers. There are almost certainly a lot of pissed off Mac/Palm users out there today.

Ars Technica reviews are lots more thorough than what the mainstream tech press can come up with, and Andy Deitrich’s take on GarageBand is no different — it provides exactly the sort of detail I was looking for, in terms of what it can do and what its limitations are.

Most model railroad track planning software is Windows-only. Empire Express 1.5 runs on Macs — including OS X — and is relatively simply to use, but limited. For one thing, it doesn’t appear to handle grades and separations. This is important if you’re hoping that the track on top will clear the track beneath it, or if you’re trying to keep your grades under control. (I’m doodling with ideas of geared locomotives and logging railroads, which means grades can go nuts, but still.)

After lots of reports of logic-board failures on iBooks, along with threats of class-action lawsuits (background from Wired), Apple has announced a program to cover logic-board failures for the next three years, replacing faulty boards at no cost to the customer, and refunding any service costs already incurred. Some people will be delighted to hear this; some of them went through quite a few replacement iBooks that exhibited the same problem. Must have been frustrating.

Still, based on Apple’s past behaviour regarding noisy Power Macs (see previous entry) and iPod batteries, it might be a mistake to characterize this as an action taken “under threat of a class-action lawsuit,” as Macintouch does. Rightly or wrongly, Apple seems to have a practice of not commenting on repair and replacement programs until they’re in place and ready to roll, which means they’re silent on the issue longer than they could be. As a result, they don’t move fast enough to satisfy their customers, who know about the problems long before the program is ready. To be fair, Apple isn’t likely to know that it’s more than an isolated issue until they get complaints by the truckload, but they’d benefit from a quicker response.

MacUser has a review of the iPod mini, which, try as they might, they can’t see the appeal of. Maybe it’s because of this: “While we haven’t been able to test a unit yet, the specifications and price don’t seem to suggest that Apple has a winner on its hands.” Seems to me that a device whose main attraction is its size is something that has to be evaluated physically, rather than the review-by-spec that MacUser writer Kenny Hemphill has come up with — viz.: step one, divide capacity by price and compare with least expensive full-sized iPod; step two, conclude that the mini is a poor value. (I went on about this at length in a previous entry.) You’d think that by now the product reviewers would be able to break out of the pack and say something that hasn’t already been said a dozen times before. [Edited]

Part of the problem is the myopia of much of the Mac commentariat: they know a lot about the Macintosh ecosystem, but don’t do so well outside of it. Thus they can compare the value of a 1.25-GHz iMac vs. a 1.6-GHz Power Mac G5 on price and performance, but wouldn’t do so well comparing them to their PC equivalents. iPods aren’t Macs, they’re consumer electronics devices; yet Mac commentators fall into the habit of comparing one Apple product to another one, instead of comparing them to the other manufacturers’ products — they do exist, people — against which the gadget will be competing. That’s like comparing a US$2,999 17-inch Powerbook to a US$2,999 dual-processor G5 on performance and complaining that the Powerbook is too underpowered for the price: they’re different products serving different needs.

Fortunately, Mac.Ars doesn’t make that mistake, and provides a list of the competing MP3 players in the same price bracket. And Eric Bangeman’s analysis of the potential market is much more thoughtful. Now that’s more like it. (Not a permanent link Link updated.)

Yesterday, Rio announced an upgrade to the Rio Nitrus, a small MP3 player with a tiny four-gigabyte hard drive that will sell for $249. Hardly anyone paid attention.

Also yesterday, Apple announced the iPod Mini, a small MP3 player with a tiny four-gigabyte hard drive that will sell for $249. And everybody complained that it was too expensive.

It’s indicative of how thoroughly Apple dominates the MP3 player market that everyone compared the Mini to Apple’s current iPod line, instead of the players in the market segment in which the Mini will compete. It’s also indicative of just how clueless commentators can be.

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I’m beginning to think I should just put O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter.com RSS feed in my sidebar and be done with it. Here’s Derrick Story, he of Digital Photography Pocket Guide fame, writing about using the iPod as a digital photo storage device, thanks to the new card reader from Belkin (which, apparently, despite initial reviews, is not so slow as to be unusable). You can also view, upload, burn to CD and share (via Rendezvous — see Derrick’s earlier article on Rendezvous picture sharing) photos directly from the iPod.

(He said, looking forlornly at his aging, first-generation, 5-GB iPod that can’t do these things.)

OS X 10.3 Panther allows you to send faxes from any application through the app’s print panel. Here’s an O’Reilly article on faxing by Wei-Meng Lee that, once again, I should note for future reference. I suppose I should plug the modem back in at some point. Though you can also fax through your mobile phone via Bluetooth, which is pretty cool. (As far as I can tell, faxing via a modem-equipped Base Station is not in the cards.)

I should note this O’Reilly Network article on regular maintenance for Panther for future reference. In two years I have not once repaired permissions or forced periodic maintenance in OS X — and, astonishingly, I appear to have gotten away with it. So far.

Bill Palmer almost gets it right about people who want a headless iMac — i.e., an affordable, consumer-level Mac without a monitor. It’s only partially about monitor choice, which, Palmer argues, Apple has addressed by providing four screen options (one CRT, three flat panels) across its consumer line.

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For a site that declares its hostility to Mac zealotry and positions itself as a debunker of the Reality Distortion Field, MacNET doesn’t exactly go out of its way to be balanced. Instead, it tends to go off the other deep end. And no clearer case in point could be its reactions — two of them — to Apple’s latest product releases, the 20-inch iMac and the dual 1.8-GHz Power Mac G5.

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